Hyperbole comes easily when talking about Joshua Oppenheimer's grand movie project. Yet even the honors he's received, including an Oscar nomination and a MacArthur "Genius" prize, don't fully articulate the effect that these thrilling works have had on many who have experienced them. The director's sibling documentaries combine to give audiences one of the most startling and vital nonfiction works of this century. The Act of Killing (2012) showcased to the world the memories of murderers, Indonesian gangsters who decades on continue to wield power. The Look of Silence, which rolls out across the country this month, focuses on the families of the victims, in particular an ophthalmologist named Adi who seeks out the story behind his brother's brutal slaying. Esquire spoke to Oppenheimer about how these two films relate and how his decades-long journey made him a different person.

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How did the two-film project start?

I first went to Indonesia in 2001 for six months. I was to help a community of plantation workers to make a film documenting and dramatizing the struggle to organize a union in the aftermath of the Suharto dictatorship. I found really awful conditions as the women were made to spray a weed killer with no protective clothing. They were afraid to do much as the company would hire Pancasila, the paramilitary group in The Act of Killing, to threaten the women and their families. What was killing these women was not just the chemicals, but fear.

Despite this fear, they continued to tell their stories.

The people would talk about one victim in particular, Ramli, who was almost synonymous with the genocide. His death had witnesses. People had seen him being tortured and crying for help. Unlike the tens of thousands of other victims who were dispatched from concentration camps to be killed and dumped in rivers in the dead of night, they left his body on the plantation. The whole region has been traumatized by mass killing, and then the government threatened everybody never to speak of it. You can't grieve, you can't mourn, you can't work it through, so to talk about Ramli was to hold on to reality by a thread, to pinch yourself to remind yourself that you're awake.

So there was collective sanity in being able to point to one person who'd suffered.

Yeah, and this was undeniable. "Here's his grave." You see it in the film, it's right in the middle of the plantation where I started this journey. I then wanted to make a film about what it's like for them to live surrounded by the killers, to have the killers still in power, living in fear that they could do this again at any time. Quickly I was introduced to Ramli's family, and then to Ramli's brother Adi who would become the subject of The Look of Silence.

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You found Adi's story unique, yes?

He had this courage and open curiosity. It stemmed from the fact that he wasn't born during the killings, so he wasn't immediately exposed to the horror of the genocide itself and he wanted answers. He saw in my filmmaking process a way of getting the answers that he was looking for.

How did he help get the stories told?

He would gather survivors together at his parents' house to talk about what they had been through. They would arrive afraid that they could be overheard. If even a motorcycle passed, we would have to stop filming, and if there was time, hide away the camera. To have a motorcycle was a sign of power. The survivors had been discriminated against for so long, were so poor, that all they had were bicycles.

You began filming only a few years after that threat had mostly subsided, yet the fear remained real.

Very quickly the survivors were threatened not to participate [in the documentary]. The army and police found out what we were doing and told them to stop. Luckily, no one came to any harm. Then Adi, more intensely than anyone else, encouraged me not to give up. He said, "Try and film the perpetrators. Maybe they'll speak." That sounded preposterous to me.

It sounds preposterous to me!

[Laughs] I was afraid to approach the perpetrators, but when I did I found it was much less physically frightening than talking to the survivors. We were never in any fear. It was emotionally frightening. I found to my astonishment that they were all boastful and immediately open about the worst details of the killings. They would talk about the murders in front of their families, even their small grandchildren. They would invite me to places, launching into spontaneous demonstrations of how they killed. When I showed that to the Indonesian Human Rights Committee, to those survivors who wanted to see it, everybody, but particularly Adi, said continue to film the perpetrators, because anyone who sees this will understand exactly why we're so afraid.

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So Adi, the subject of the second film, helped push you to make the first?

Adi found so many answers to his questions about why his family is so afraid in [The Act of Killing]. I spent two years filming every perpetrator I could find. Throughout the period of filming, he would watch whatever I had to show him with this sort of devastation and intense curiosity that you see in The Look of Silence.

What initially stood out from those interviews with the perpetrators?

The genesis of the whole project is the scene that appears several times in The Look of Silence where the two men take me down to the river and pose for photographs at the bottom, taking turns playing victim and perpetrator, gleefully. Those two men were from two different death squads from neighboring villages, yet I had this horrible feeling that they were speaking from a shared script. I had this feeling I was getting something much closer to performance than remembrance. Performance is always intended for an audience: Who is their imagined audience? How do they want to be seen, by me, by the camera, by the world audience? I thought if I let these men continue to show me what they've done in whatever way you wish, I will film the reenactments.

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Then years into this project you met Anwar Congo, the main subject of The Act of Killing.

Anwar was the 41st perpetrator that I shot, and I ended up spending five years filming him. The first day that I met him, he took me to this rooftop and showed me how he killed. It wasn't even surprising that he brought wire. What was unique was that after showing how he killed, Anwar said, "I've been drinking, taking drugs, going out dancing to forget what I've done so I don't go crazy." He started to dance, as if trying to banish in the same spot the pain that he's just talked about, performatively banishing it from the scene. I had this realization there that the boasting isn't just a sign of pride at all, but may be a desperate attempt to convince people and themselves that what they did was heroic. We can distance ourselves from the reality of what we did through storytelling.

You must have known from that point on that there would be two separate facets of this project.

Long before I started The Act of Killing, I knew there were two films. One should be about what happens when killers win and impose a victors' history on the whole society, the moral vacuum that's inevitable and the relationship between guilt and escapism, fantasy, and storytelling. There was this other film about what it means for human beings to be forced to live in the shadow of the people who killed their loved ones.

And why did The Act of Killing come first?

First of all, it was too dangerous until I in a sense infiltrated the highest levels of Indonesian power for me to do anything with the survivors. We kept getting arrested, the survivors were whipped. I could have probably cut something with what I had, but I knew I was just at the beginning of an exploration. From the moment the survivors and Adi said film the perpetrators instead I knew that had to come first and I had to take that film to its conclusion.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

What effect did you think it would have?

I knew that the first film would force Indonesians and the international viewers to confront the fact that we're all closer to perpetrators than we like to think, that it would open the discussion in whichthe second film in its quietness could really be heard. To put it crudely, The Act of Killing would blast open the space for the more delicate film, The Look of Silence, to do its work.

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It's a companion piece. It's actually both prequel and sequel.

It's kind of a prequel, but it comes second, right? If I'm to be reductive, the confrontations could never have been shot safely if the perpetrators didn't have second thoughts about attacking us because they assumed that I was close to the vice president of the country, the head of the paramilitary movement, the governor. Even Anwar is above these people in the hierarchy, although these people are regionally very powerful.

"I didn't want the audience to be able to let this film go."

Had the first film come out by the time any of the interviews were done?

No, it hadn't, and that was crucial. The core of The Look of Silence was filmed after I finished editing The Act of Killing, but before I released it. Because I knew I couldn't safely return [to Indonesia] after I released The Act of Killing. I wanted to resist in The Look of Silence making a film that ends with any kind of positive hope I feel in human rights documentaries dealing with human survivors. Almost all of them do end so that the audience can feel, Okay, somehow, either now or down the road, some truth and reconciliation commission will take care of this. That's dishonest, and only for the benefit of the audience so they can let the film go and think about something else. I wanted them to be immersed in the mess that comes with impunity, to viscerally feel the dead can never be wakened. I didn't want the audience to be able to let this film go.

Do you see this as the end of this process?

I'm done with making films in Indonesia.

Do you see a time when the end credits will be revised to no longer list your collaborators as "Anonymous"?

There's nothing I would like more than to be able to cut off the end credits and put in new ones with all 60 people's names. Many of them I'm in touch with all the time and I love very much.

How has this project shaped your future projects?

Films can't change the society, they can simply open the space for the discussion which can lead to social change and can start new forms of social activism. I feel formally that I've scratched the surface of something very important about the nature of nonfiction film, about what we're very rarely honest about: When you film anybody, they start performing.

No matter what you do to get past that performance?

People create the illusion of acting natural, which is what I think most documentarians do in part because of the direct cinema orthodoxies that came into play really in the '60s. That moment of performance is a tremendous opportunity to make visible something hitherto invisible, which is how people want to be seen. How do they see themselves? What are the scripts, fantasies, genres by which they imagine themselves? How is storytelling part of what we are as human beings? We wouldn't kill each other en masse if it weren't for storytelling. We wouldn't be able to live with ourselves.

I think we need to make documentaries about fantasy and storytelling. I think I just started to scratch the surface of a method that allows us to do that. We want to be sucked into the events, suspend our disbelief and imagine that this is a fiction, but actually putting onscreen the gap between who the people are and who they want to be and therefore opening the question about why they want to be this person.

So, ironically, by making films that allow the participants to engage in fictional recreation, you contribute to truth telling.

In The Look of Silence, Adi finds out how his brother was killed through my footage. He watches it and he decides to meet the perpetrators. They only meet me because I've filmed them before. Those scenes are only possible to be shot because of the years in which they knew I was filming with other perpetrators. That also inevitably means that both of these films become films about cinema.

How so?

Because everyone in the film is real and the stakes are very high, the audience puts this tremendous emotional investment in what's happening. In a fiction film, we know at some level we've suspended disbelief. Here we know that we're watching a drama unfold in the world because of the movie we're watching that is real. That has enormous stakes for the whole society, and we, by the act of watching, complete the story.

What has this project meant to you personally?

It's made me who I am. Learning from Adi, I've become much more forgiving. Learning from my encounter with Anwar's humanity, I've become more forgiving, even though I have no patience at all for denial, justification of wrong, rationalization. I've become virtually a pacifist, so I feel that no atrocity is ever justified. I've become more vigilant about evil. I think I recognize its seeds more quickly. I see its source.

You can see people's insidious nature?

Yeah. It's there in the way we deny, we justify things to ourselves that we know we've done wrong. It's about escapism and our willingness to look away from things that ought to appeal to our basic humanity. This project has made me more forgiving and it's taught me that I need to trust myself and go where my instincts tell me, and to be as wild and free as possible in my creative decisions. That was in a way easier when no one had any expectations of me.